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Justice Department’s ‘Clinton Cash’ Probe Collapses

Justice Department’s ‘Clinton Cash’ Probe Collapses

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

U.S. Attorney John Huber reportedly intends to close, without bringing charges, his two-year review of the U.S. government’s decision not to block the sale of the company known as Uranium One. The news serves as a stinging rebuke to the right-wing media figures who spent years massaging that government decision into a scandal aimed at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — and to the mainstream reporters who helped them.

Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, under pressure from Fox News critics and the president they regularly advise, appointed Huber in November 2017 to review the sale of Uranium One and other purportedly “unlawful dealings related to the Clinton Foundation” and determine whether they required further investigation. That probe is now winding down, with The Washington Post reporting that its sources say “Huber has largely finished and found nothing worth pursuing” and that the inquiry will involve “no criminal charges or other known impacts.”

The report is a rebuke to the right-wing and mainstream reporters who trumpeted the Uranium One tale, which was transparent nonsense from its inception. Former Breitbart head Steve Bannon, conservative author Peter Schweizer, columnist John Solomon, and Fox host Sean Hannity all played key roles in a wide-ranging effort to damage Clinton and then to protect President Donald Trump by falsely suggesting that Clinton corruptly influenced the sale of Uranium One to Russian interests. And The New York Times made a controversial deal that put its institutional heft behind Schweizer’s shoddy reporting, instantly turning the story into national news.

Journalists should consider this final and inevitable collapse of Schweizer’s bogus claims as they decide whether and how to cover his forthcoming book, which will reportedly target the purported corruption of several Democratic presidential candidates. 

How Steve Bannon, Peter Schweizer, and The New York Times launched the Uranium One pseudoscandal

The Uranium One pseudoscandal has its roots in the work of the Government Accountability Institute, a nonprofit conservative investigative research organization founded by Bannon and helmed by Schweizer, a conservative author with a record of major factual errors and questionable sourcing. In 2015, Schweizer used GAI’s work as the foundation for Clinton Cash, a sloppily researched and shoddily reported book which alleged that Bill and Hillary Clinton “typically blur the lines between politics, philanthropy, and business.” 

One of the book’s bogus allegations was Schweizer’s claim that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton played a “central role” in approving the Russian State Atomic Nuclear Agency’s 2010 purchase of Uranium One. Schweizer speculated she did so because Russians and people linked to the deal had donated to the Clinton Foundation and arranged for her husband’s speaking engagements.

But this made no sense: The State Department had only one of nine votes on the committee that unanimously approved the deal; State’s representative on the committee said Clinton never intervened on the issue; other state, federal, and foreign agencies had approved the deal; the timing of the donations Schweizer referenced was inconsistent with the theory; and Schweizer himself admitted he had no direct evidence Clinton had intervened.

Poorly researched right-wing allegations of Democratic corruption are common, and Schweizer’s book might have been relegated to the likes of Fox and the rest of the conservative media. But under Bannon, GAI developed a cunning media strategy to weaponize its reporting by feeding it to mainstream news outlets. And that’s what happened with Clinton Cash, as The New York Times and The Washington Post made “exclusive agreements” with Schweizer “for early access to his opposition research on Hillary Clinton.” 

For the Times, the result was a story giving credence to Schweizer’s allegations about the Uranium One deal that ran on the front page of its April 24, 2015, edition. The story quickly unraveled, with further revelations about the process the deal went through leading NBC News to conclude the next day that, “upon reflection, that Times article doesn’t hold up that well.” But the damage was already done, with Schweizer’s reporting moving into the mainstream after effectively receiving the seal of approval from the most powerful brand in U.S. political news. Uranium One received waves of coverage during the 2016 presidential campaign, and Trump highlighted the pseudoscandal on the campaign trail, helping to generate a shroud of corruption around Clinton as the election approached.

John Solomon and Sean Hannity turn Uranium One into the “real” Russia collusion

Rather than fading from view after Trump’s victory, Uranium One subsequently became a key right-wing defense after special counsel Robert Mueller began reviewing ties between Trump’s associates and Russian interference in the 2016 election. Fox hosts like Hannity revived the story in the months following Mueller’s appointment as supposed evidence that Clinton had perpetrated the “real collusion” with Russia. 

Conservative columnist John Solomon gave the tale new life in October 2017 when he reported that “Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation” as part of a scheme to ensure the Uranium One deal’s success, and suggested that Mueller, as FBI director, had covered up the attempt by Russia to bribe the Clintons.

Solomon, who has a long record of turning out stories alleging impropriety by Democrats which later fall apart, provided no evidence that the Clintons were aware this was happening or that Mueller had acted improperly, and of course the underlying conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton pushed the Uranium One deal through still makes no sense.

Nonetheless, in late October and early November of that year, Solomon’s reporting triggered nearly 12 hours of Uranium One coverage on Fox News, as the network’s pro-Trump propagandists argued that the story was evidence that Clinton “sold out America to the Russians” and that federal investigations into the roles of both Clinton and Mueller were necessary. Hannity was particularly obsessed with the story, giving it nearly three-and-a-half hours of airtime over that period, hosting Solomon eight times, and using it to call on Mueller to resign. Echoing the Fox coverage, Trump’s congressional allies called for the appointment of a special counsel to review the Uranium One sale. And Trump himself, responding to entreaties from his television, termed the Uranium One deal “the biggest story that Fake News doesn’t want to follow!”

Fox uranium one obsession

By the end of November, Sessions succumbed to that wave of congressional, presidential, and Fox pressure — which included an Oval Office meeting in which network host Jeanine Pirro criticized him to the president for not pursuing the conspiracy theory — and appointed Huber to review the claims. 

Solomon’s story, already based on faulty premises, would dissolve over the following months as it came under scrutiny from House investigators. His reporting revolved around the claims of an anonymous source, later revealed as the lobbyist William Douglas Campbell. But Justice Department officials subsequently told House oversight committee staff in December 2017 that Campbell was “too unreliable to use as a witness due to inconsistencies in his story” and had “offered no evidence about Clinton.” In a February 2018 interview with House investigators, Campbell was similarly unable to produce evidence that the review process for the Uranium One deal had been improperly influenced. 

Notably, Campbell’s lawyer for these dealing was Victoria Toensing, the Republican attorney who often appears on Fox to promote claims of Democratic malfeasance. Toensing is also Solomon’s longtime lawyer, an apparent conflict of interest not revealed in Solomon’s Uranium One reporting. 

Schweizer’s new book gives journalists a chance to break the disinformation cycle

Toensing and Solomon have more recently been in the news for helping to create, along with other associates and Toensing clients, a sprawling disinformation campaign targeting former Vice President Joe Biden. That effort, helmed by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, alleges that Biden improperly pushed Ukraine’s government to fire its general prosecutor in order to benefit his son, Hunter Biden, who was serving on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings, which they claim the prosecutor was investigating. 

Those baseless and repeatedly debunked allegations originate with a familiar source: Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, who wrote about them in his 2018 book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends. Secret Empires received little initial attention outside of right-wing media — it was only when Giuliani seized on the Biden conspiracy theory and seeded Solomon’s reporting that the story broke through to the mainstream. Meanwhile, Hannity and his colleagues at Fox have seized upon the Biden allegations, just as they did Uranium One.

Later this month, Schweizer will be out with a new book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite. At a time of shocking malfeasance at every level of the Trump administration, from the president on down, Schweizer’s book on corruption will reportedly target Democratic presidential candidates including Biden and Sens. Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren. 

Journalists should be wise to Schweizer’s schtick of producing bogus and easily debunked tales of Democratic corruption for Trump’s political benefit by now. They have no reason to trust his reporting and every reason to doubt it. If they choose to amplify his new book, they are amplifying conspiracy-minded garbage. John Huber just all but told them so.

When Charity Is A Mask For Brutal Exploitation

When Charity Is A Mask For Brutal Exploitation

Our society has coined expressions like “philanthropist” and “season of giving” to encourage and hail people’s charitable spirit.

Look on the flip side of those shiny coins of generosity, however, and you’ll find that they’re made of a base substance of societal selfishness. After all, the need for charity only exists because we’re tolerating intentional injustices and widespread inequality created by power elites.

A supremely wealthy society (which so loudly salutes its historic commitment to the deeply moral values of fairness, justice and equal opportunity) ought not be relegating needy families and essential components of the common good to the vicissitudes of a season and the whims of a few rich philanthropists. Yes, corporate and individual donations can help at the margins, but they don’t fix anything. Thus, food banks, health clinics, etc. must constantly scrounge for more charity, while big donors have their “charitable spirit” subsidized with tax breaks that siphon money from our public treasury.

Especially offensive is the common grandiose assertion by fat-cat donors that charity is their way of “giving back” to society. Hello — if they can give so much, it’s probably because they’ve been taking too much! As business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin points out, “All too often, charitable gifts are used … to make up for the failure of companies to pay people a living wage and treat their workers with dignity.”

Sorkin notes that it’s not just the unemployed who rely on food banks but janitors, nannies, Uber drivers, checkout clerks and others who work full time but are so poorly paid they can’t make ends meet. That’s not a sad charity case but a matter of criminal exploitation by wealthy elites — and the charitable thing to do is to outlaw it and require a living wage for all.

We must shift from charity to fundamental structural change. “The aim,” says Sorkin, “should be to create a society where we don’t need places like food banks in the first place. … we should be trying to put the food banks out of business.”

In the absence of structural change, our society relies on charity and government programs to address issues regarding poverty and hunger. While it’s fashionable in many enclaves of the rich to bemoan government programs that use tax dollars to aid the poor, guess who receives by far the fattest benefits from the public treasury. Bingo — if you said the rich!

Consider recent actions by President Donald Trump’s secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue. He’s been dubbed the “Georgia Goober” for his ignorant insults and preposterous policies, and he issued a harsh new regulation in December that’s both. It slaps poor people living in depressed areas with a sneering work requirement in order to be eligible for meager food stamp benefits, which amount to only about $127 a month. Yes, Perdue is literally taking food from poor people, piously claiming it’ll help them become self-sufficient. “(G)overnment dependency has never been the American dream,” preached Purdue, who has personally been dependent on a government check for more than two decades.

Crass hypocrisy, however, is integral to the Donnie & Sonny policy approach. Last year, they pushed out a $28 billion tax bailout for farmers impacted by Trump’s inept tariff tiff with China. Many U.S. farm families have been wrecked by Trump’s failed ag policies, but they’re not the ones who got the Trump government’s helping hand. The bulk of the billions went to the biggest, richest agribusiness interests that neither needed nor deserved a public handout — about 75 percent of the total was taken by the largest 10 percent of farm corporations (including foreign-owned operations). And, unlike a food stamp recipient getting a pittance to buy a little bit of food, some ag-biz outfits pocketed more than $2 million each from us.

But wait. Trump and Perdue have more meanness in store for the poor. They’re pushing another federal regulation that’d cut off food stamps if a low-income family has barely $2,000 in “assets.” Hello — that means a family that has an old used car to get to their poverty-wage jobs would be denied food assistance.

What’s wrong with these shameful public officials who perversely pamper the rich while taking pleasure in punishing the poor? It’s immoral.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

Trump, Giuliani Promote Anti-Semitic Attacks On Soros

Trump, Giuliani Promote Anti-Semitic Attacks On Soros

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

President Donald Trump’s Twitter attack last week on George Soros set off a round of anti-Semitic attacks on the Jewish financier, as well as authoritarian calls from key Trump supporters for the president to use state power to freeze or seize Soros’ assets.

Conservatives have long been obsessed with Soros, a key figure on the left who has supported a raft of progressive organizations, including Media Matters. Right-wing commentators frequently attempt to draw links, however tangential or absurd, between Soros and virtually any protest or action that happens on the left, seeking to delegitimize grassroots energy as the work of a shadowy billionaire. At times, that criticism is steeped in classic anti-Semitic tropes that have been used for generations to justify attacks on Jewish people.

In the latest attempt in this vein, conservatives have tried to blame Soros for the opposition to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. On Friday, Trump, apparently responding to something he saw on TV, amplified that criticism. He tweeted that protests against the pending confirmation of Kavanaugh had been “paid for by Soros and others”:

Not all criticism of Soros is anti-Semitic, any more than is all criticism of Sheldon Adelson, a major conservative donor who is also Jewish. Both are major players in their respective movements, and reporting on people who wield such influence is a vital journalistic endeavor. But such critiques must be made carefully because horrific acts have been justified by the notion that Jewish people control the political system.

It is impossible to imagine Trump — who has relied on anti-Semitic tropes in speeches, on Twitter, and in a campaign ad, and is beloved by anti-Semites and white supremacists — treating the issue with the required care. Given the comment and its context, many commentators have suggested his tweet had anti-Semitic overtones. Trump-supporting denizens of far-right fever swamps certainly interpreted it that way — they praised Trump for having “named the Jew,” a term bigots use for identifying the supposed Jewish masters of the world.

The next day, Trump’s close allies began pushing for him to use the power of the presidency against Soros. Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, retweeted a comment calling Soros “the anti-Christ” and arguing, “Freeze his assets & I bet the protests stop”.

Bill Mitchell, a fervent Trump superfan with a radio show and over 380,000 Twitter followers, publicly fantasized about jailing Soros and seizing his assets for “seditious conspiracy.”

Many commentators have pointed out that those tweets also have anti-Semitic overtones. They also involve the president’s supporters literally asking him to do what dictators do — use the power of the state to punish his political opponents, explicitly for the apparent crime of opposing him.

That same morning on October 6, Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative foundation Judicial Watch, whose investigations are geared to benefit the president, honed in on Soros’ overseas pro-democracy work. Fitton, a favorite of the president and his Fox News propagandists, argued that the federal government should cut off its support for Soros’ non-governmental organizations. According to Fitton, Soros is aligned with the “Deep State” and the tax dollars funding the work of his NGOs abroad allow him to devote more of his own cash to backing progressive organizations in the U.S.

Who benefits from cutting off funding to pro-democracy movements? Authoritarian leaders and nationalist parties across Central and Eastern Europe. The very forces that have spent the last several years demonizing Soros, often with anti-Semitic attacks that have driven rising concerns about the safety of Jews in their countries.

Fitton is effectively arguing to help out Vladimir Putin in order to own the libs. And considering Giuliani’s and Mitchell’s Twitter activity, it wasn’t close to the most authoritarian suggestion of the weekend.



Header image by Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Son’s Death Led Her To Found Brain Tumor Registry

Son’s Death Led Her To Found Brain Tumor Registry

By Richard Asa, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

CHICAGO — Carol DeAngelis Kruchko is a self-described “doer.” Usually a blur until she can be persuaded to sit down for a conversation, the president and administrator of the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States (CBTRUS) is indefatigably dedicated to her cause.

Essentially, the important data the organization collects and carefully codifies is the legacy of her son Willie, who died at age 3 from medulloblastoma, a relatively rare and fast-growing tumor found mostly in children.

Before Kruchko founded the registry, standard data reporting in the U.S. was limited to malignant cases. To quote the group’s website, “non-malignant brain tumors, however, may, and often do, impose the same costs to society in terms of medical care, case fatality and lost productivity as malignant brain tumors.”

The organization incorporated by Kruchko as a nonprofit in 1992 has since become a nexus for gathering and distributing current epidemiologic data on all primary brain tumors and is intricately tied to the neuro-oncology community. The registry describes incidence and survival patterns, evaluates diagnosis and treatment, helps enable causal studies, and promotes awareness of the disease.

She describes the registry, which she runs from a small office in Hinsdale, as more than a full-time job, instead referring to it as “always there” — or what she does whenever something needs doing to “keep this going.”

A native of Providence, R.I., where she grew up in an Italian-American community, Kruchko graduated from St. Mary’s College, a sister school of the University of Notre Dame, and received a bachelor’s degree in biology education. After graduation she became a librarian at Notre Dame while her husband, Bill, worked on his degree there.

They went on to have four daughters and then adopted two boys. During that time, Kruchko says, she was a stay-at-home mother who was active in the PTO and local gardening club, while organizing enrichment experiences for the children that included trips to Chicago museums and other educational sites.

After Willie died, she worked for Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), a network of community-based programs that trains volunteers to study the lives of neglected and abused children and file reports with judges overseeing the children’s well being. After four years, she left CASA to devote her full attention to CBTRUS as payback to the American Brain Tumor Association for its help during Willie’s fight for life. Following is an edited conversation.

Q: What made you decide to turn a personal tragedy into something so positive and far-reaching?

A: I wanted to give back to everyone who had helped out the family. It was too important not to do something, and (Willie’s) life was too important to just sit back and go on with my life. Life is too special to do that. I just feel you have to give back to humanity for what has happened and make it count for something.

Q: How has CBTRUS moved the study of brain tumors forward?

A: It gives us a true picture on the incidence of brain tumors in the U.S. and in that respect has helped research move forward. It also has affected brain tumor data collection worldwide. Other registries have (followed) our model, so it also has filled a need to quantify the impact of brain tumors on society.

Q: Have you run into obstacles or challenges along the way?

A: The biggest challenge is funding. There are tons of things we feel we can do to improve data collection and reporting but funding is the big challenge. Otherwise, if there’s a problem, I want someone to tell me right away. I want to deal with it head on. I don’t want anything to fester. I want to deal with it and figure out a way to solve it.

Q: What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a cause and follow it through as you have?

A: Keep the trust. If you’re going to be doing something that will be good for many people, trust that it’s going to work. I just believe that things intrinsically valuable to people will continue on. It might be hard but others will see what is valuable and important and it will be supported. Every once in a while I’ll sit back and say, “Oh, my gosh, how did all this happen?” It happened because it was supposed to happen. It’s fateful and faithful.

Q: What do you do to refresh yourself?

A: I visit my children and grandchildren. (She has eight grandchildren.) We have a grammy and grampy camp in the summer, and the grandchildren come and stay with us without their parents from two to six weeks. I also love watching adventure mysteries. I like movies such as “The Bourne Identity,” both Sherlock (Holmes) shows (“Sherlock” and “Elementary”) and “Person of Interest.” We also love to hike. (Laughs) I also like to clean. I don’t think that should be in (the story).

Q: Being of Italian heritage, do you treat yourself to anything particular in the way of comfort food?

A: For me, it’s angel hair pasta and I equally love mashed potatoes. I make a potato soup and sometimes, polenta with a lot of my own sauce on it. I make my own meatballs and I love them. I’ve taken frozen packages of my meat (mix) to my daughter in Hong Kong because the meatballs don’t taste the same without it.

Q: Where do you find inspiration?

A: (Having) faith. I belong to the altar guild at my church. It’s a group that takes care of all the vestments and the chalice. It’s another way of seeing people do something special as a collective and being able to articulate in their work how important God is in their lives. We all have stories and if you’re open to them you’ll receive little messages, but you really have to listen.

TNS Photo/Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune